MSU Scholar Profiles
Jeff Grabill
As a Co-Director of the Writing for Digital Environments Center (WIDE), Jeff Grabill uses digital writing and web development in order “to enable community voices in the twenty-first century.” Yet creating the perfect means for community information access and discussion doesn’t come easy. It requires a number of people with differing talents, a certain technological infrastructure, and, above all, a tremendous amount of work for community groups to leverage advanced information technologies to support their activities. Grabill’s team sets out to facilitate these groups’ understanding whom they address, what their message is, and, ultimately, how to proceed. Grabill’s role is often to assemble the right people, find the necessary resources, and to keep the conversation going until a solution is reached.
Grabill was instrumental in helping to revise Capital Area Community Voices (CACVoices), via a three-year project funded by an Outreach and Engagement grant that was aimed at redesigning this community information resource. The project, however, encountered difficulties when using the website proved “too challenging to be a good community resource.” In digital communication, the major struggle for the wider community is often accessibility since there are few paid professionals in community groups to help with complex communication processes. Grabill worked with MSU undergraduate and graduate students as well as users within the Lansing community in an effort to develop new interfaces and a content management system that could improve the website usability.
Whether working with community groups or with MSU units, Grabill recognizes that effective team collaboration is a key to success. He is thrilled to join forces with a variety of on-campus units ranging from the College of Arts and Letters to the College of Engineering and from the College of Human Medicine to the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. He always finds these to be “fun partnerships” at the intersection of technical writing and rhetorical theory. These projects, says Grabill, “are built on good relationships with people: as long as they are nurtured, the projects are continued.”
Throughout his projects, Grabill has been driven by his belief in public rhetoric as a means for people to change the world through communication. He likes to emphasize that new media have the right to be considered next to the “traditional rhetorical channels of speaking and writing.” New technologies and public domains brought about an expansion of the range of performances that should be understood as “rhetorical”: from Native American beadwork to new media; from theatre to online meetings; from old-fashioned community organizing to social networking based on the newest technologies. The degree programs that Grabill is associated with (Professional Writing and Rhetoric and Writing) strive to improve the understanding of these performances and to help others perform more effectively. “I like to repeat something to my students,” says Grabill, “that comes from a book on public speaking that I like a great deal: if you don’t intend to change the world when you get up to speak, whether that is to 3 people at work or to 300 people in a public space, then don’t get up at all.”
Jeff Grabill is the author of two books, Community Literacy Programs and the Politics of Change and Writing Community Change: Designing Technologies for Citizen Action, and many articles. To read more about his interests and courses, please visit the Writing in Digital Environments website.
